Stella McCartney / Pre-Fall 2014

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Delve behind the clothes and how many closets can tell a story? Stella McCartney’s pre-fall collection is, in many respects, a playful walk through her oldest half-sister Heather’s anarchic teenage years as a punk—in full regalia and spiked hair—finding her way in eighties London, listening to Steve Strange and the Clash on her Walkman (the flat, pointy-toe metallic shoes hint in that direction) and then—boom!—suddenly being forced to rediscover herself, both emotionally and sartorially, when her parents uprooted the family to the English countryside after sisters two (Mary) and three (Stella) joined the McCartney clan. “I was interested in the emotional shift for her,” Stella explains empathetically, “and also the reality of going from the city to the country and from hard to soft, in a sense.”

How that translated into wearable clothing for this coming pre-fall was with solid and exaggerated patterns and textures (a tenuous interpretation of her sister’s self-expression) splashed across voluminous silhouettes and softened and feminized with tactile fabrics. An oversize dotty print on a tulip-shaped evening dress was given a gentle spin in duchesse satin, for instance, while a brushed mohair blanket coat with fringed selvedge was cut from a patchwork of houndstooth in differing sizes. Everything rang with the type of playful, ostentatious charm often associated with McCartney’s oeuvre. “I was looking a little bit into the past,” she surmised. “And this idea of bringing the past into the future.”

That rang true in more ways than one as the designer revived a former collaboration with her friend and British artist Gary Hume. The duo worked together on her inaugural runway show back in spring 2002 where a number of sensuous silky dresses featured the lauded Young British Artists’s figurative abstract prints. More than a decade on, McCartney has given those arresting, graphic sketches an athletic overhaul and reworked them into embroidered coats, oversize sweaters, and intarsia knits. “It was sort of a rediscovery,” she said with a simple shrug of the reason for collaboration number two. “I loved those pieces I did with Gary; we just felt we had more to do with them.” And as they are arguably some of the standout pieces in this collection, you’ll be glad she did.